The Columbia City Council met on June 3, 2026, to review the annual actuarial valuation of the Police and Fire Retirement Fund as of September 30, 2025, and to receive an update on the fund's investment portfolio from UBS. The meeting concluded with a motion to enter closed session to discuss legal matters and employee negotiations.
Actuarial Valuation Presentation: Nita and Heidi from Gabriel, Roeder, Smith & Company (GRS) presented the actuarial evaluation results. Key data points:
Investment Portfolio Update: Mark Shigowski and David Sears from UBS presented the portfolio performance.
We've got one item on our agenda first off, please require pension action value report. Uh, and then we have a couple things into closed session. So I'm gonna go ahead and assume I'm kicking this over to Jim or Matthew and McCall, Matthew, whichever wants to grab the microphone. All right. Okay, so we're gonna present the actual report. So we have Nita and Heidi from GRS, and they're gonna kind of go over the report, and then afterwards we have Mark Shigowski and David Sears from UBS, they're our investment portfolio managers, and they're just gonna talk a little about a little bit about the investments as well. So uh Mita and Heidi, if you guys are uh on and can hear us, uh, we'll let you get started. Our video is disabled for some reason. Okay, so the host has the level songs. All right, thanks, Mark. We'll get that to take care of it. To share my screen. I don't know. Yes, you might show you how they can see that's a lot of technological advanced. Um I don't know, we have to accept it, I guess. Somebody accepts it on that side of the table. So mayor, is this an hour? Yes. Okay, thank you. I need to be oriented. Can everybody see it? Yes. Okay. Well, uh, good afternoon, everyone. Uh, my name is LesMeads well and presenting with me today is my associate. Heidi Barry. We are from Gabriel Rotterdam Company, and we are the actuaries for the police and fire retirement fund. Heidi and I are very pleased to have the opportunity to present the September 30th 2025 actual evaluation results of the retirement fund. If we can turn to slide two, Heidi. The purpose of the annual actual evaluation is twofold. One is to determine the employer contribution rates for both the police group as well as the fire group for the fiscal year ending September 30th, 2027. And the second very important reason is to measure the funding progress in relation to the actual cost contributing. And that's just a fancy way of saying what portion of the actual recruit liabilities, which means the liabilities associated with service that the police members and the fire members have already earned as of September 30th, 2025. What portion of those liabilities are covered by what we call the funding value of assets. Okay, this graph is meant to kind of give you an idea of part of the benefit of prefunding a system. So if you look at the green bar that's increasing over time, those are your benefits being paid out of the system. That's what we would call a typical pay as you go. And benefits are actually ready to be paid the system is paying it as it um occurs. In a pre-funded plan, at the very start of the plan, you're receiving employee and employer contributions, even though no benefits are being paid, and that money is being invested. So when you look at the horizontal line, which is the level payment below that horizontal dotted line is your employee and employer contributions coming in. So at the beginning of the plan, you can see to the left, not paying out as much in benefits as the contributions that are coming into the system. When you look at the section above the dotted horizontal blue line and the green lines, that is the amount of investment income that we are expecting to be able to help offset the employee and employer contributions to pay for benefits and expenses being paid out. So that's why it's really important to pre-fund. Now when we perform the actual evaluation, there are a lot of different variables that we need to take into account when we're calculating the employer contributions and the rest of the results that you see in that actual valuation report. We need to look at the census data, the uh asset data, and then um, well, in terms of the census data, we're looking at your active members who could potentially receive a benefit in the future. We're looking at retirees and beneficiaries who are currently receiving benefits, and then terminated vested members who may have maybe entitled to a benefit sometime in the future. The other three things we're looking at are benefit provisions, what the system is actually planning on paying its members when they retire, the actual assumptions, we need to make assumptions about things because we don't know what's going to happen in the future. So we have to make assumptions about when people retire, when people will die, how many people will quit and will they be eligible for benefit, or will they just receive their refunded contributions? A lot of different assumptions that we need to make to uh determine the cost, and then we need an actual funding method, and this is how you pay or the system pays for those benefits over time. So there were no benefit provision changes, actual assumption or funding method changes.